With this set, we’ve reached the end of the first chapter of Vinny 3.
My diabolical plan is to leave you hooked enough to keep reading this comic every Monday. It won’t always be this dark, but… who am I kidding? It’ll be like this most of the time.
Regarding last week’s confession about my potentially embarrassing use of AI in my comic, I’m happy to report that nobody guessed what I did!
The truth is, a lot of what AI gave me wasn’t all that useful. It helped me get the process started, but in the end, I drew most of it the way I always do.
Let me walk you through my process.
First, I did a rough sketch, just as I always do for my pages. That’s the first image. There’s no detail; I simply block in the elements more or less where they belong.
Then I fed it to ChatGPT to see how it would interpret it.
The second image is what I got back. You’ll notice that, at first glance, it’s VERY impressive. Everything looks incredibly detailed. But once you zoom in and start looking at the individual elements, the problems begin to show.
In the foreground, Chato decided to put Satan in a suit. And this was AFTER I’d already given it a character reference!
Second… in the panel where Vinny is drinking coffee, it seems to have given him TWO MOUTHS!
And then there’s the coffee cup. In the first panel, it gave him a Starbucks cup (complete with an upside-down star, which I never asked for). In the next panel, it switched to a little porcelain cup, only to go right back to the Starbucks cup in the following one!
The forklift in the foreground… HAS NO FORKS! And the cargo I’d drawn in my original sketch? It turned that into a background element!
Next, I re-inked everything over Chato’s drawing. And that’s when I discovered another problem.
THE ENTIRE PERSPECTIVE WAS WRONG. Not a single vanishing point was going in the right direction.
In the end, the only part I actually used was the drawing for the first panel. For Vinny and Satan’s acting and expressions, I stuck with my original sketch.
I won’t say the experiment was useless. It gave me a few ideas. I had an absolute blast fixing all the mistakes, and I think the final result ended up being a little different from what I would have come up with on my own.
My conclusion remains the same: AI isn’t taking my job just yet.
I don’t know if I’ll keep using it. Probably not for Vinny. This week’s episode, for example, has absolutely NO help from Chato.
But I’ll keep experimenting. If I discover anything new and useful, I’ll let you know.
In the meantime, I’d love to hear what you think.
Did you enjoy my experiment?
Bachan.